Video Formats

1.Students will understand what the difference is between analog and digital video. 2. Students will learn the advantages of digital video formats over Analog.

Analog signals are electrical signals measured in voltage. The information is stored on magnetic tape.

Video Home System: VHS was developed in the 1970’s. It is a video format that records onto magnetic tape and can degrade over time. S-VHS is a slightly higher quality VHS tape but still has the same problems.

Beatcam is a more professional video format that still records on magnetic tape.

Digital video signals are made up of a series of 1’s and 0’s. This also referred to as binary code.

Each point is given a series of digits that represents the brightness and contrast of the image

Very common high quality digital video cassette. Used in most digital video cameras today.

High quality Professional digital video cassette.

Digital Video Disc: 4.7 GB DVD-R DVD+R DVD-RW DVD+RW

Hard Drive storage: KB: Kilobyte MB: Megabyte = 1000 KB GB: Gigabyte = 1000 MB TB: Terabyte = 1000 GB PB: Petabyte = 1000 TB EB: Exabyte = 1000 PB

Video Formats Analog or Digital?

.Jpeg: (Joint Photographic Experts Group) Very common image file. Nearly every digital cameras store there files in this format. Jpeg file can suffer generational degradation when repeatedly edited and saved.

.Tiff (Tagged Image File Format) Some digital cameras can save in the TIFF format but it is not as common as jpeg. This format is not widely supported by web browsers. TIFF is the standard for printing in the photograph business.

.mov (Apple QuickTime Movie File) Common Multimedia format often used for saving movies and other video files. Developed by apple computers and it is compatible with both Mac and Windows platforms.

.DV (Digital Video File) An uncompressed video file from a digital video camera. This file can be imported into a computer to be edited.

.mpeg (Moving Picture Experts Group) A compressed video format that is used for creating movies that are distributed over the internet.

.m4v (I-Tunes Video File) MPEG-4 file extension used for videos downloaded from the Apple iTunes store,copy-protected using Apple's FairPlay DRM copyright protection. To play a protected M4V file, your computer must be authorized (using iTunes) with the account that was used to purchase the video.

Analog signals will degrade over time Duplicating analog signals creates imperfections and decreases the video quality. Digital Signals will not degrade over time. A digital signal can be duplicated as many times as you want without imperfections.

This term is related to the loss of signal quality created when making multiple copies of an analog video signal.